I do not like horror movies. Never have. Never will. Growing up a black female in America has always been horrifying enough. There are real life monsters roaming American cities.The mean streets of this country are both Wall and Main. Many people are standing on the blocks scared beyond reason. (Scared beyond reason is at the intersection of fear and anger.) Letting the funk fake them.
I do not like horror movies because I frankly don't understand why people pay to be terrified. There is so much fear available for free. For the last fifty years or so, I've had to work hard not to buy into the free-floating fear targeting the civilized and their civilizations.
This is not always an easy thing to do. So much fear available. We have so many choices of who to fear. Or what.
Frightened people do a lot of stupid stuff. Frightened enough, stupid stuff becomes the only thing they can do.
Take the tea-baggers for example. They wear anger as a mask for their fears. They squeal constantly and growl fiercely. Having grown up with white privilege as a diet staple, they are terrified. One of the problems with white privilege is it creates expectations and convicts you with the notion that it is your right to win. These people cannot accept losing in a system they believed to be weighted in their favor. The bitterness on John McCain's face (I think) stems in part from him making history as the first white man to lose to a black man for the Presidency of the United States. A major privilege(white male only for the Presidency) was challenged. He lost it. Not the mantle he sought, not the legacy he wanted. The one he has nonetheless.
It does not occur to the tea-baggers to inform themselves of facts. Facts are the first victim of fear and anger. The corporate media is complicit in making sure that the idea of facts remains an abstraction in terms of the news. We have long since moved away from the notion that the news is supposed to be a watchdog for the people. Rather they entertain the people and distract the people and allow the facts to remain an ambiguity to the people. Thus the masses become asses.
The so-called broadcast news has become for me a horror movie. It is the daily Nightmare on Elm Street.I understand they are about to release a remake. Thanks.
I accidentally started watching the first version at the end. As far as I'm concerned, the end is the only part to watch if you are going to watch a horror movie. The end is where the monsters are killed and life goes back to normal.
Freddy Kruger(the monster of Nightmare on Elm Street) is standing in this girl's bedroom. She apparently is the sole survivor of this monster with steel blades for hands. Before he can grab her, she starts telling him that she figured it out and the only power he has is what she gives to him and she takes it back. All of it. She shouted at him to return her life, to give back her friends and family and turned her back to him. Freddy reached out towards her and disappeared.
That's what monsters do when you take your power back and refuse to be afraid. They disappear.
It occurs to me it might be time to make the monsters go away. Blacks and whites together ought to kill the monster of racism and white privilege by taking our power back and not allowing ourselves to believe we can do this without a lot of effort.Taking power back is a simple notion. Simple an easy are two very different creatures. Nobody intelligent ever said change would be easy. Necessary? Yes. Easy? Oh hell to the no.
Thing is, it is easier not to take your power back and work your ass off to stay out of the fear column living seized up and paralyzed by fear than it is to face that particular monster.
What we are witnessing between us and the tea-baggers is a collision of alternate universes. They are all powerful in their reality. We are all powerful in ours. We must choose to stay in ours and either bring them to us, or let them fall away. We cannot ourselves become fearful. We cannot buy into their anger and we cannot allow their anger to become our reality.
In order to win this war against racism and racists, the monster of privilege must be vanquished. Until it is seen, acknowledged and rejected, it will keep at least one foot in the door of the tea-baggers reality.
To take our power back, we as black folk must keep our voices raised and refuse to back away from the notion that white privilege is the heartbeat of racism here in the good ole U S of A. As long as it exists, inequality will remain a reality.
Until this is done, America will remain a horror story for black and brown people.
Now run and tell that.
Editorial Note:
This weeks news stories are a must read. Amazinggrace has outdone herself finding noteworthy stories you might have missed.
News
Amazinggrace News Editor SistahSpeak
What If the Tea Party Were Black? by Tim Wise
Imagine that hundreds of black protesters descended on DC armed with AK-47s. Would they be defended as patriotic Americans?
Full read here
On Wrecked Street, Haitians Feel Aid Has Passed Them By
More than 100 long days after the earthquake, Ginette Lemazor, her husband and their impish 5-year-old boy are still living in a filthy mechanics’ lot on Avenue Poupelard.
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Murder Threatens Mandela's Dream
As South Africa gets ready to host a historic World Cup, the killing of Eugene Terre'Blanche has pushed race relations to a new low, creating fear of renewed violence among blacks and whites in the country.
Full Story
Mercy, mercy me: The ecology
I remember patchouli oil, macramé plant-hangers, bell-bottom jeans and oil shortages. Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder sang about air pollution. Recycling was an exciting new concept. In high school, I learned about conservation and wrote impassioned papers on "Silent Spring and "Custer Died for Your Sins." Like the millions of other wistful young hippie-wannabees of the Seventies, I had vague notions about the superiority of a "natural" lifestyle and going back to the land.
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The Next Empire
All across Africa, new tracks are being laid, highways built,ports deepened, commercial contracts signed—all on an unprecedented scale, and led by China, whose appetite for commodities seems insatiable. Do China’s grand designs promise the transformation,at last, of a star-crossed continent? Or merely its exploitation? The author travels deep into the heart of Africa, searching for answers.
More here
Not-Black by Default
Last week, Melissa Harris-Lacewell wrote an insightful column, "Black by Choice," about President Obama's having checked the box marked "Black, African American or Negro" on his Census form. As she notes, despite the way his complex heritage both disrupts "standard definitions of blackness" and creates "a definitional crisis for whiteness," in American culture "having a white parent has never meant becoming white" if one also has an African-descended parent.
More here...
Black folks need to get off the fence when it comes to profiling immigrants
There is this historical competition between poorer Blacks and newly arriving immigrants when it comes to jobs in the U.S. There are also some historical tensions within these communities, especially in places like Los Angeles, where Blacks and Latinos have, by designed, been relegated to co-occupy the same outlying neighborhoods. They have, as a result, competed for territory. Latinos have in many ways replaced blacks as the new poor "but still working" class. Consequently, many black folks remain reticent about immigration reform. We are sitting on the fence even as Arizona passed a clearly racist and clearly anti-civil rights immigration enforcement statute.
Continued
Arlington graves cover black city
Charter buses roll up to Arlington National Cemetery every day, depositing tourists who scramble uphill to see the eternal flame on President John F. Kennedy's grave. People stream in all directions, toward the Tomb of the Unknowns or to remember at tombstones of loved ones lost to war.
Few, however, head downhill to a quiet corner near the Iwo Jima Memorial.
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Exposing the Christian Right's New Racial Playbook
A diversity summit at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University reveals that the religious right's survival depends on the black and the brown.
Full Story
Cops Involved in Repeat Shootings and Excessive Force Still on
Duty
A thwarted attempt by the San Diego Tribune seven years ago to obtain disciplinary records for a deputy sheriff has rewritten police accountability across California. That case wound up at the California Supreme Court, which issued a sweeping ruling, Copley Press v. Superior Court, in August 2006.
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